Check out this building that was 3-D-printed by a robot

Watch the digital construction platform create a building
from scratch and see what researchers have planned for it in the future.

By Amina Khan April 28, 2017 6:05 PM

The future of construction just got a little bit more
real. Researchers at MIT have created a mobile robot that can 3-D-print an
entire building in a matter of hours — a technology that could be used in
disaster zones, on inhospitable planets or even in our proverbial backyards.

Though the platform described in the journal Science
Robotics is still in early stages, it could offer a revolutionary tool for the
construction industry and inspire more architects to rethink the relationship
of buildings to people and the environment.

Current construction practices typically involve
bricklaying, wood framing and concrete casting – technologies that have been
around for decades in some cases, and centuries in others. Homes and office
buildings are often built in the same boxy, cookie-cutter-like templates, even
though the environment from one area to another may change dramatically.

“The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC)
sector tends to be risk-averse: Most project fabrication data nowadays have
been digitally produced, but the manufacturing and construction processes are
mostly done with manual methods and conventional materials adopted a century
ago,” Imperial College London researcher Guang-Zhong Yang, the journal’s
editor, wrote in an editorial on the paper.

In recent years, scientists and engineers have begun to
explore the idea that buildings could instead be built through additive
manufacturing – that is, 3-D printing. A home could be customized to its local
environment, it could use buildings resources more efficiently, and it could
deploy materials in more sophisticated ways.

“Right now, the way we manufacture things is we go to the
mine, we dig out minerals and materials, we ship them to a factory, the factory
makes a bunch of mass-made parts, usually out of a single material, and then
they’re assembled — screwed together, glued together and shipped back to consumers,”
said lead author Steven Keating, a mechanical engineer who did the research as
a graduate student under Neri Oxman’s group at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.

But the group’s many projects, he added, revolved around
this question: How do we actually fabricate in a way that is more consistent
with how biology works?

Keating pointed to the tree as one example of a natural
builder. Trees can self-repair, operate with self-sufficiency, build onsite
with locally sourced materials, and adapt to their environment.

“These are the kinds of principals that we’ve looked at
for a lot of the projects in the group,” he said.

While several groups around the world have been working
on large-scale 3-D printing techniques, there have been challenges in this
process, Keating said.

“A lot of other research projects that are looking at
digital construction often don’t create something of an architectural scale —
and if they do, they’re not using a process that could be easily integrated
into a construction site,” Keating said. “They’re not using materials or a
process that can be easily code-certified. And what we wanted to make sure
could happen is we could actually break into the construction industry, because
it’s a very slow and conservative industry.”

Keating and his colleagues’ robot, called the Digital
Construction Platform, looks to address those issues. It features hydraulic and
electric robotic arms and can be loaded with all kinds of sensors to measure
its environment, including lasers and a radiation-detecting Geiger counter.

In less than 13.5 hours, the robot was able to zip round
and round, printing a 14.6-meter-wide, 3.7-meter-tall open dome structure out
of a foam used as insulated formwork.

Strange as it looks, this formwork could be filled with
concrete. Since this is essentially what already happens in traditional
construction, this 3-D printing process could be integrated into current
construction techniques. (In both the traditional and 3-D-printed scenarios,
the formwork ends up as the building’s insulation.)

This process has a number of advantages, many of which
allow the robot to design and build more in the way that living systems in
nature do, Keating said. Three-dimensional printing uses fewer materials more
efficiently. It can also create useful gradients, such as reducing wall
thickness from the bottom of a wall toward the top. (Nature does this too:
Think of a tree’s trunk at the base versus near the top, or the way a squid
beak goes from hard at the tip to soft at the base.)

This process can create and work with curves, which are
usually more costly for traditional building methods. The formwork also cures
so quickly (within about 30 seconds) that the robot can build horizontally
without needing structural support the way traditional construction methods do.

Rather than trying to design the perfect structure
beforehand, a 3-D-printing robot could produce a building that’s completely in
tune with its environmental factors – soil moisture, temperature, wind
direction and radiation levels, among others. This is how scientists think
animals such as termites build their homes — by modifying the structure in
response to the environment.

Since it’s solar-powered, this robot can be
self-sufficient. And like living things, it could potentially create building
materials out of stuff in the local ecosystem: The authors showed that the
robot was able to take scoops of dirt and turn the compressed earth into
building material. The researchers were even able to print with ice.

“I know it sounds silly — why would you want to print
with ice? — but if you actually look, NASA’s very seriously thinking about
using ice as a fabrication material for places in space such as Mars, because
ice actually absorbs a lot of cosmic radiation,” Keating said.

Printing with ice from the environment would be much more
sensible than lugging all your building materials all the way to the Red
Planet, he noted.

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